Books from Denmark

STIG DALAGER has published more than 50 works in all literary genres, preferably novels and plays . His novels and drama are published in 26 countries. He has won international praise- especially for his novel about Marie Curie: The Blue Light and his novel about Hans Christian Andersen, Journey in Blue. Journey in Blue was nominated for the prestigious British Impac Prize in 2008.

The psychological mechanisms and historically determined displays of hate under extreme political conditions, described so insightfully by Stig Dalager, can still happen. This story, tragically almost forgotten, is told with masterful authority. Stig Dalager has displayed unflagging tenacity in his research …

— Berlingske Tidende

STIG DALAGER: REJSE UDEN ENDE

Journey Without End

JOURNEY WITHOUT END is about the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg (1912 - ?)The novel describes the life and fate of one the most revered personalities of the 20th century; the turmoil of one of the darkest moments of the 20th century; how he succeeded in rescuing 100,000 Jewish lives in the war hell of Budapest, and his subsequent imprisonment and enigmatic disappearance in the Gulag. The Soviet officials told us he died from a heart disease in 1947, but we now know that they lied.

The novel moves with him from 1978 when he is held as a so-called dissident in a Soviet psychiatric hospital back to when he was imprisoned in the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow in 1947. We follow him when, in the summer of 1944 and at the age of 31, he sets off on his journey from the Berlin Central Station with his two backpacks, an old pistol, his Eden hat and trench coat to Budapest. He struggled night and day not only with Adolf Eichmann’s SS-henchmen, but also with a whole range of Hungarian Nazi ministers and civil servants. At the very last minute, he prevented Eichmann’s plan of carrying out a total massacre of the 75,000 Jews in the central ghetto of Budapest. This was when Wallenberg went “underground”, but before he did so, he had managed to save 100,000 lives.

Journey without End describes a man, who at a fixed point in history and in spite of fear and crisis decides to act on his empathy with the victims of politics. Wallenberg is a practical and adventurous idealist with a sharp intelligence, who never - not even during his lifelong imprisonment – gives up on his dreams. Not even when his life is at stake. In this novel his dreams live on.